Getting started

The MegaPOV source code is managed with the
Mercurial Source Control Management system. If you want
to get actively involved in MegaPOV development you should consider getting this tool. We encourage everyone
who develops unofficial extensions of POV-Ray or creates derived versions of MegaPOV to make available their
changes in Mercurial format. This will simplify integrating such modifications into the main MegaPOV
codebase.

If you cannot or don't want to use Mercurial you can get the development snapshot on the right. This
package is updated regularly and contains the full content of the repository.

Create a new and empty project directory somewhere on your file system and build an empty repository there:

$ cd <project-dir>
$ hg init

Get the current repository bundle from the box on the right and do:

$ hg unbundle megapov-init.hg
$ hg update

Pull the latest changes from the MegaPOV web repository:

$ hg pull http://megapov.imagico.de/cgi-bin/hgweb.cgi
$ hg update

Please always get the bundle before, don't pull the full content
into an empty repository. The resources on the webserver are limited and
pulling the whole content takes a lot of server resources and bandwidth.

Building the repository content

The repository does not contain all the files in the
release source packages. The easiest way to
build the content is to copy it over a source package for your platform. You might need to manually
add new files to the build system. For Unix systems we will add a script to generate all required files
when we find the time to sufficiently clean it up and document it.

Working on the code

Some more help on working with Mercurial can be found in the
tutorial
and other material on the Mercurial site.
If you want to share modifications of MegaPOV for example in the
POV-Ray newsgroups you can use the Mercurial export function.
If you want to publish larger changes you can use the bundle function.

If you are developing patches for POV-Ray this public repository should help you to keep
them in sync with MegaPOV codebase. This will simplify work for you and also make it easier
for us to integrate new patches and changes into MegaPOV. We also hope the source access will
intensify testing of patches before the release and thereby improve the quality of the code.

Getting involved

Even if you are not working on the POV-Ray source code there are a lot of ways you can participate
in MegaPOV, for example by:

testing modifications.

creating sample scenes for new patches.

writing documentation.

developing include files using MegaPOV features

If you are interested in participating visit the povray.unofficial.patches newsgroup on the
POV-Ray newsserver. You can also contact us via
EMail.